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Read Cockburn and St. Clair's Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press and discover how the CIA gave a helping hand to the opium lords who took over Afghanistan, thus ushering the Taliban into power.

New Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively to Subscribers: If We Had a Rocket Launcher A SPECIAL REPORT: Pension Frauds and the Utterly Disgusting, All-Too-Typical Story of How Workers Were Conned Out of Their Pensions; This Was No Enron, But a Big-Time Public Pension Fund; She Thought She'd Get $2,250 a month, Ended Up with $800; The Facts on the Ground; The Day-to-Day Hell of Palestinians in One Village Under Military Occupation; Homes Destroyed, Crops Ruined, Roads Dug Up. Remember, the CounterPunch website is supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! Or Call Toll Free 1--800--840--3683

August 6, 2002 Robert Fisk The Return to Afghanistan Alexander Cockburn The Fox in the Pension Fund August 5, 2002 Rahul Mahajan Iraq and the New Great Game Jordy Cummings The Last Frontier of Israel and Palestine Bernard Weiner Inside Saddam's Diary Mike Leon US Mute to Israeli Brutality Norman Madarasz Brazil: the Most Important Election of 2002? August 4, 2002 Susan Davis Fat Americans August 3, 2002 David Krieger Nuclear Apartheid Gilad Atzmon The End of Innocence Gavin Keeney Everybody's a Critic Alexander Cockburn Can the Times' Jeff Gerth Save Dick Cheney? August 2, 2002 Ralph Nader The Labor Party Chris Floyd Moral Maze: Bankruptcy Made Easy Jeremy Scahill Saddam, Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld Jeffrey St. Clair Dark Deeds in the Black Hills: Daschle Dooms the Sacred Land of the Sioux August 1, 2002 Steven Higgs Activists Under Siege Anthony Gancarski Draft Picks: Staffing the Latest War Zeynep Toufe Invisible Children: AIDS, Africa and Selective Vision Alexander Cockburn Drivel and Squawk: Angelina Jolie, the NYT and the Attack on McKinney July 31, 2002 Amelia Peltz Inside Ramallah: How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing? M. Shahid Alam The Academic Boycott of Israel Bernard Weiner 20 Things We've Learned Since 9/11 Philip Cryan Discourse and War in Colombia Neve Gordon A Feast of Bombs: Sharon's Endgame for Palestine Resources: 100s of Links About 9/11 CounterPunch: Complete Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath Five Days That Shook The World: Seattle and Beyond By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair Photos by Allan Sekula (Click Here to Order from CounterPunch Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!) INSIDE Subscribe Online! EXCLUSIVE TO COUNTERPUNCH SUBSCRIBERS Published March 15, 2002 Facing Down Rehnquist and Scalia: Jennifer Harbury at the Supreme Court; ADL Throws in Towel, Pays Up: How They Worked for Apartheid Regime and Spied on NAACP: Cockburn on America the Bully: From Teddy Roosevelt to George W. St. Clair on Musicians Against the Death Penalty & The Legacy of the Mekons. Search CounterPunch Read Whiteout and Find Out How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden Whiteout: CIA, Drugs & the Press by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair The Memphis Blues Again: Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs Photos by Ernest Withers Text by Daniel Wolff The New Intifada: Resisting Israel's Apartheid Edited by Roane Carey                           A Pocket Guide to Environmental Bad Guys by James Ridgeway and Jeffrey St. Clair The Phoenix Program by Douglas Valentine Al Gore: A User's Manual by Cockburn and St. Clair Buy This Explosive New Book at an Amazing Discount!  Reviews of Gore: a User's Manual Private Warriors by Ken Silverstein CounterPunch's Booktalk

August 6, 2002 From Hiroshima to Hope by David Krieger "I will write peace on your wings, and you will fly all over the world." -- Sadako Sasaki August 6th. Hiroshima Day. A time for reflection, for listening to the sounds of birds and water, the rustling leaves, for remembering who we are. We remember Hiroshima not for the past, but for the future. We remember Hiroshima so that its past will not become our future. Hiroshima is best remembered with the plaintiff sounds of the bamboo flute, the Shakuhachi. It conjures up the devastation, the destruction, the encompassing emptiness of that day. The Shakuhachi reveals the tear in the fabric of humanity that was ripped opened by the bomb. Through that tear we could all be sucked as into a black hole in the universe of decency. Nuclear weapons are not weapons at all. They are a symbol of an imploding human spirit. They are a fire that consumes the crisp air of decency. They are a crossroads where science joined hands with evil and apathy. They are a triumph of academic certainty wrapped in the arrogance and convoluted lies of deterrence. They are Einstein's regret. They are many things, but not weapons -- not instruments of war, but of genocide and perhaps of omnicide. Those who gather to retell and listen to the story of Hiroshima and of Sadako are a community, a community committed to a human future. We may not know one another, but we are a community. And we are part of a greater community gathered throughout the world to commemorate this day, seeking to turn Hiroshima to Hope. If we succeed, the child Sadako of a thousand cranes, who would have been an older woman now, will be remembered by new generations. She will be remembered long after the names and spirits of those who made and used and celebrated the bomb will have faded into the haunting sounds of the Shakuhachi. David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is the co-author with Daisaku Ikeda of Choose Hope: Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age recently published by Middleway Press. He can be contacted at dkrieger@napf.org. Today's Features Robert Fisk The Return to Afghanistan Alexander Cockburn The Fox in the Pension Fund home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /